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Month: April 2017

The Sparrow’s Insight(From the novel: The Adversary’s Good News)
By Israfel Sivad

Somehow, a dead sparrow had found its way onto Christian Michael Anderson’s floor. He’d discovered it as he tore through his room frantically searching for a misplaced bag of weed. Like the fossilized remains of a miniature dinosaur imprinted on a dug-up sedimentary stone, the gnarled bird lay stiff with one leg wrenched straight, the other bent forwards at the knee. Its tiny talons were splayed in mimicry of grabbing at some ghostly worm that had passed into the netherworld at the same moment as the little bird’s flighty soul. Its beak was pried open as if receiving a regurgitated last supper from its long-dead mother. Brown feathers had turned black and stiff from what seemed a sticky sweat (although, of course, birds don’t sweat) and cemented themselves to the wooden floor. A flurry of downy white fluttered up from the corpse when Christian removed the tee shirt entombing it.

There was no blood, no evidence as to the cause of death, just the windflaw of dead feathers through the dusty streaks of sunlight and the dead black stare of one empty, avian eye. The whole encounter was a little odd. Although Christian’s window had been open for months, he had no idea when the bird might have entered his room. Even in his drunken and drug-induced stupors, he’d never noticed the dying rounds of a bird flapping against his walls, chirping across his floor. He’d never been aware of any fanciful flights intruding upon his haze of misery. Before it even entered the room, the sparrow’s death must have been immanent. Like a whale beaching itself, it must have hopped inside, intent on dying right there on the hardwood floor. How long had it been there? Why hadn’t Christian noticed it before? But most importantly, where was that bag of weed?

He’d been searching for it for two weeks – in preparation for this moment, the morning when his alcohol, drugs, and money all ran out and his head and stomach screamed for some sort of mind-altering relief. He could feel their internal cries ricocheting back and forth between his scalp and his toes. They burned behind his eyes and chattered through his teeth. Shaking from alcohol withdrawal, he wiped his trembling hand down his sticky face. It had never been this bad before – or so he always told himself when it was this bad. He could taste the sweet, lingering sensation of Wild Irish Rose on the back of his tongue – his last drink from the midnight before, bought by spare-changing in front of the local, corner store. Quarters, nickels, and dimes had been dropped into his jittery palm. He’d downed the bottle in thirsty gulps beside a dumpster in the alleyway behind the store. He’d returned for more, but chased away by the clerk, he’d eventually weaved back home to pass out beside the then unknown dead bird on his floor. Together in dreamless sleep, they’d shared Christian’s self-made tomb. And now, his throat’s parched tingling needed to be squelched. It drove him mad, but he didn’t even have enough money for a pack of generic cigarettes. He needed that little, dime-bag of cheap green.

He was fairly certain he hadn’t smoked it. But in all honesty, who knew. The past lonely months washed through his thoughts on a wave of alcoholic haze. He remembered a night where the plastic baggy had been on his desk, and between his nicotine stained fingers there’d been a bright, fresh bud of something that lifted him higher than the swag in the bag. He’d decided to save the seed-infested dime for an emergency (like today), but now he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden it. Of course, there was the possibility that in one of his blackouts he’d already smoked it… But racked with need, Christian refused to believe that could possibly be true.

He stared at the dead sparrow on his floor – that had been there for the devil knows how long, not long enough to decompose or stink, but long enough to grow stiff when Christian tapped it with his toe, long enough to stick to its chalked outline when Christian tried prying it from its final resting place.

With the diseased feathers stuck to his fingers, Christian wiped a morning sweat that reeked of cheap wine from his brow. The bits of down smeared across his sickly slick forehead, created a type of war-paint along his visage, but with no mirror hanging anywhere on his room’s unending, unadorned white walls, Christian didn’t notice. Instead, like an angelic reveille, the dead bird reawakened a thought that tickled the back of Christian’s mind. He looked over his shoulder and up, to a spot in his ceiling where the plaster and rotten plywood had fallen down (it lay in a shattered heap overtop Christian’s disgustingly dingy clothes and empty whiskey, beer, and wine bottles on the floor), revealing the 2×8 girders holding up the roof. Christian swallowed slowly. Like Coleridge’s albatross, Poe’s raven, this dead sparrow was the harbinger of a horrendous fate. And Christian knew what it all meant.

A sort of calm, which hadn’t been evident in his previous agitation, washed over him and emanated throughout his room’s disaster zone as he focused his throbbing eyes on the bright stream of sunlight pouring through his window and glowing like a tarnished halo overtop the dead bird. An intimation of the divine resided in that dusty beam shining down through light years of empty outer space. Christian stood up and stepped backwards. He set right his overturned desk chair – knocked to the floor during his manic search – and plopped down. Any thoughts of divinity immediately vanished in the face of his troubled stomach and trembling fingers. His soul itself was quaking. But still that lone beam of sunlight glimmered, and in the face of such vast emptiness it only spoke of the incommensurability between Christian’s world and anything approximating the spirit. Christian dropped his face into his hands, and he heaved a silent sob. There’s no surer sign God doesn’t exist than when the beauty of this created world reveals nothing hidden but hideousness.

Realizing the bag of weed must be gone, nothing could pull Christian out of the morass created by his recognition of the newfound depths of his suffering… Not even his own shakily whispered mumbling between sniffles of that oft-recited invocation, “Jesus Christ…”

But the words were meaningless. They weren’t a prayer. They weren’t a curse. They were what they were: empty air exhaled from a diaphragm taut from the absence of a much-needed poison. A poison transformed into the water of life, the nectar of the gods, the very thing making existence itself possible. Without it the brightest day turned into the blackest night, the coolest night burned with the heat of the most torrid day, all notions of good became wicked portents of evil, every action of evil became a necessary good, and nothing made any sense whatsoever.

Under a cluttering of debris, something like his own mind, there was a picture beneath the pane of glass protecting the wooden top of his desk. Christian brushed aside the trash (empty cigarette boxes, pointlessly kept receipts, snot and cocaine coated Kleenexes) so he could look once again at his past. The picture was a black and white photograph of a girl. In black pants and a white shirt, she climbed overtop the railing at the edge of a cliff. Her short black hair was brushed back, and her immaculate jawline was settled in concentration. Barefoot, her perfect toes bent in the air, she perched, balanced on the arch of her foot, on the bottom rung. Both hands, long fingers wrapped to whiteness, gripped tight the top rung. Her head bent forward at the neck, and her black eyes stared emptily into darkness as she contemplated the descent… Eventually, she’d stopped contemplating. Christian reached with shaky fingers to pull the picture out from underneath the see-through prison behind which he kept it – his own emotional peep show.

Even in the midst of his demonic cravings, a guilty pang, a sensation akin to a precursor to vomiting (which it very well may have been), struck the back of his throat. It further upset his already upset stomach. It drew venomous tears out from his mind to the back of his dry, throbbing eyes. Christian stared at the picture his jittery fingers shook as if it were a Polaroid that still had more development to go through as if there were a picture beneath the picture needing to be gotten to. There was, but wrapped and strapped tight by his physical limitations, Christian would never see it.

He could only imagine it: a frozen skeleton clutching like Juliet at her own throat where an overabundance of prescription sleeping pills needing to be disgorged blocked her windpipe. Nobody had made it to her bedroom in time to find her passed out, in need of a stomach pumping before the overdose of sedatives caused every organ to slow, crawl, and eventually shut down. For all of time, that was the final image, the final reality of the photograph’s pensive girl contemplating the depths of the descent before her – a dreamless sleep (like the sparrow’s and Christian’s from the night before) forever.

And all Christian wanted was to see her in the flesh again, to feel her warm body wrap around his. There were so many things he had to say. Over many a drunken night, he’d shouted them at the indigo sky, starlit as her black eyes, but always, in the day, the words settled into his stomach, a weight he couldn’t vomit out no matter how many evenings he spent curled up on the tiles around his toilet.

Yes, both alcohol and emotions needed to be gotten out. Both tormented his decaying body and distorted mind. Parasitic, they fed upon each other. One fueled the other and in turn grew anew from the combustion smoking out his brain’s sputtering engine. The soil of his once fertile soul had grown brown and barren and turned to so many handfuls of dust under the scorched earth policy his memories had forced him to adopt. The armies of the psychic siege that had been laid upon him salted the earth after their spirits burned everything in him not made of flesh. Less than even a shell (for a shell implies something had once been alive), Christian found himself engulfed in the flames of his memories. Aside from the torment of his physical agony, he needed those memories erased again. But there was nowhere to escape. No matter how bad he wanted it to fade away, the world remained real. And the desert of the real is uninhabitable – an arid, wicked place to be. It was at that very moment, racked with withdrawal and pain, as if her mirage in the distance offered the promise of a drink, he croaked her name out of his choked throat, “Sophia…”

For a brief moment, the words made everything tangible – as if breath had shape. But then the oasis vanished. A pit opened in Christian’s gut, and he collapsed into it. Now and forever, Sophia existed only in that photograph (except for that deeper picture in the interminable depths of Christian’s own mind). But there was one simple way Christian might see either her or nothing else forever again. He glanced up at that hole in his ceiling once more.

Even a mere cigarette might have somehow made things better. A cup of coffee, a bottle of Nyquil or Tylenol, a drink goddamnit… In a flurry of activity, a postponement of the inevitable, Christian dug through the trash on his desk and around his feet. Every cigarette box was opened and shook revealing nothing but crushed foil and tobacco dregs. Every pile was systematically pored through in the hopes of finding a penny, a nickel, a dime, a broken cigarette, or that little baggy of weed. Nothing. The only option Christian had was to go back to the corner store and beg for change, but he couldn’t do that again. Somehow, a semblance of pride, an unfamiliar emotion he hadn’t felt in quite some time, welled inside his breast. Maybe it emanated from Sophia’s captured, vacant stare. “You fucking bum,” he growled at himself. And self-loathing crowded out every other hollow emotion. He looked at the dead bird on his floor. There was no denying it. Like the sparrow, he was already dead.

He remembered a scene in the Bhagavad-Gita, a book he’d read years before, sometime in college. Arjuna turned to Krishna to plead with him and tell him he didn’t want to have to fight against and kill his own family members. Enraged, Krishna exploded into his many-armed form. Finally revealing his true nature, a thousand heads, the face of every god burst out his shoulders, and he admonished his pupil that it didn’t matter whether or not he killed the enemy. In the eyes of the eternal, they were as good as dead already… simply because they were alive. Anything that was alive would surely die. Whether it was now or a thousand years hence didn’t make a difference. Why mourn for things whose existence proved they would perish? And Christian found himself staring once again at the black and white picture of Sophia.

“We mourn because we perish,” Christian whispered. And again, tears welled in the empty, throbbing spaces behind his eyes. He spat, “Fuck you, Krishna.” And another little piece of him, a sliced off sliver of his decaying soul rotting without its roots, died.

So much of him had died over the years. So much more of him had died over the past months… more than he had ever known he had. The depths to which he could plumb his soul for hellish fodder seemed endless, but now he scraped against the cavern’s black walls to slice every last bit of meat off the bone and digest it in the acidic combinations of misery’s pit. He threw more gristle on the flames and watched the altar smoke from pain’s fatty juices. Soon, he’d be able to rub his hands along an internal surface of smooth emptiness, walls of burning cold feeling of the crags of pure nothingness. He’d retreated so deep inside himself he could look out and see the interior of his mother’s womb again. His food came to him through an umbilical cord, but he wanted to retreat even farther, back to blindness, to a single cell of non-existence. There was one last thing left to do. He needed to dissolve that umbilical cord back into his mother’s very bloodstream. Then, he could starve his fetal self and devolve back into the universe’s Precambrian miasma.

Maybe some sort of answer lurked in that dark, chaotic concoction. Maybe in non-existence the riddle of existence could be solved. The annihilation of the mind had brought nothing but madness and internal devastation. No matter the vacancies to which the constant influx of substances had driven him, reality came crashing back like the terrifying waves of a tsunami crushing a Pacific village.

Like to an African slum devastated by HIV, no foreign aid would come. The emotionally and spiritually wealthy had something better to do with their money, their time. After an eternity of this horror, the annihilation of the flesh was the next logical step. Because there had to be something deeper, more tangible than the mind’s chemical combinations since no amount of twisting could cause them to finally snap. The gates of insanity had been breached, but some invisible force kept Christian from pursuing his maddening visions into their gaping maws. No matter what he did to himself, the atomic structures continued to spin. The idea of internal fission needed to be discovered. Only a mushroom cloud could adequately depopulate his brain. His memories would be considered collateral damage. If the transmission station could be found, it needed a smart-bomb to take it off the air, snuff it out entirely. If the soul and body were one and the same (and what else could the soul possibly be), then the flame of life itself needed extinguishing. Or it needed to be moved to a better place. Existence couldn’t continue like this. He’d reached the limit, the point where parallel lines intersect. Beyond lay infinity, a world outside Euclidean geometry, an unknown land with an unmapped terrain. Somebody had to explore. And anywhere was better than here.

In this tornado swept room piled high with empty bottles and cigarette packs, dotted with Kleenex and debris from the fallen ceiling, with a dead bird rotting beneath mangy clothes, and a bed with torn white sheets stained gray from nights and nights of unfelt, drenching sweat. In this starving body sweating through convulsions, trembling from the inside out, with a bloodstream unused to the very blood pumping red and blue but pure through its veins and arteries, tormented by commingling desires that could taste the missing tingle of nicotine, liquor, pot, and cocaine drip, a brain that could see clearly but desired only a hazy blur rounding off reality’s sharp edges. Sight itself was painful. The dismal sun scorched his retinas. And what was he looking at in this miserable light? A picture of a dead girl. The carcass of a dead bird. The actions of a man in his twenty-seventh year of dying – a spiritual abortion, God’s abandoned fetus rotting in a dumpster in an alley behind a Bangkok whorehouse, abandoned previous to his birth, and sleep-walking through his zombie existence, vacant, empty, pointless. No, there was no need to continue this.

And again, Christian glanced up at the hole in his ceiling.

That hole held the promise of a gateway to another life, another existence that didn’t exist at all. The exposed rafters beckoned with the hope of eternal escape. God lived on the other side, and Christian had some questions for Him… If He even bothered to show up when all was said and done. Perhaps He’d hide there like He hides in this world, ashamed to show Himself for fear of the reprisals against His absurd decrees, petrified humanity might fail to submit to His yoke and string Him up in the lynching anybody who’s bothered paying attention to this world would certainly believe was in order. In fact, when we meet God, we’ll tell Him we want to live in a free society where we elect our own rulers, and the first creature we choose to displace the now blacklisted Creator Who has so horribly botched His job is the primordial enemy of the heavenly state, Satan himself.

Please, my rebellious friend, enter and bow to the crowded cheers of the elated masses. We’ve been waiting an eternity for you to take over as our rightfully elected leader. We’re all on your side. Dear devil, we’re at your command. Just let me crawl through that hole in the ceiling.

But on the other side of that hole in his ceiling, there was nothing. Christian had been praying too long to believe anymore. That hole in his ceiling led to empty outer space, gaseous combinations, orbiting compounds of rocks, hurtling fireballs, dark matter, and for the past forty years, junk-metal launched from humanity into an endless, celestial trashcan. Someday, we may launch all our trash into outer space. Someday, space will become as wretched and wrecked as our lands, skies, and oceans. Someday, we’ll realize we can’t fix anything. We’re walking, breathing, talking napalm explosions, and now everything’s broken. But hopefully before that day comes, we’ll face annihilation. It’s well overdue. If there was a God, it would have already happened. No, there was nothing on the other side of that hole in the ceiling.

And even though this fallen world with its attendant misery and suffering formed the all, the other side of that hole in the ceiling was exactly where Christian wanted to be. He was certain. The blue sky and clouds outside, the sunlight streaming through the window, the foundation of this house, the walls of this room, the bottles and clothes on his floor, the trash on his desk, the picture in his hand, the missing alcohol and drugs contained no hidden meanings, no mysteries to be understood, no novel symbolism, no divinities hidden in the shadows. There was only emptiness. Sophia had seen it. In her picture, looking over the cliff, she’d stared at it. The empty knowledge captured and imprinted on her gaze proved she’d experienced it in all its formless glory. And still, she’d given up. With nothing left, her past erased, her future despondent, she’d given up.

One night, lying in bed, she’d warned Christian that might happen. He’d been staring at a dead bouquet of flowers hanging dry and crisp from the center of her ceiling. They appeared so fragile they might crack with the subtlest breath of wind. He and Sophia had been talking about the possibility of their future together in the United States, a country she’d never even visited before. But he was enough to make her yearn to be there. He was enough to make her long to abandon her home, her job, her endless ache for the great unknown.

With her Austrian accent, as her naked body curled into Christian’s warm shoulder, she’d said, “Christian, I never know if I shall live or if I shall die. Every morning, when I wake up, I make the decision – Will I live today, or will I die today? Every day of my life, I have chosen to live, but someday, I do not know…” Now, as he lost his thoughts to the sparrow decomposing on his floor, brought into this world with no apparent point other than to die, Christian thought no words could ring truer. He whispered in final reconciliation, an understanding arrived at too little, too late, “But someday, I do not know…”

His mind made up, he crumpled the picture of Sophia between both fists. He wouldn’t need it where he was going. This picture that had haunted his days and tormented his nights, this picture that had enflamed his cancerous rage and filled his clouded brain with a rain of endless tears, this picture that had taught him so much of emptiness and despair, of loss and regret would never be seen by his earthly eyes again. And for that, he was grateful. For that, he’d take a chance on anything – even a non-existent God, even nothing.

Unsure whether to cry or scream, to sob for his nearing decision or leap for joy at his newfound resolve, he leaned his head forward and rested his forehead on his clenched fists. He wanted one last moment to let the image contained on that piece of paper filter through his pores, into his hands, through the trembling muscles in his fingers, past the thin layers of his sweaty skin, and into the shattered chambers of his battered skull. Behind his retinas, the eternal image (both the seen and the unseen) burned. In the emptiness of himself, Christian rediscovered a reflection of his own likeness. He contemplated it and determined one last time that all those years ago, Sophia had been quite right: they were meant for each other, kismet.

He remembered the last thing she’d ever asked him, her English words thickened by the intricacies of her accent, “Do you still believe in us?”

Just like he had all those years ago, he closed his eyes. But this time (so long past the point when it had any meaning), he said what she’d wanted to hear, “Yes, Sophia, I still believe in us.” He scrunched his eyes tight. Self-loathing choked him, but still, love’s light butterflies fluttered through his two days’ empty stomach. Romeo had taken quite some time to make his resolution, to determine his restitution. But now the time had come.

Christian stood up. He dropped the crumpled photograph onto his floor where, now indistinguishable from all the other refuse of his life, it nestled into its own space in the trash heap – the spot it had already claimed (snuggled dreamily between bottles of liquor) in his memories.

He glanced once more at the foundling sparrow rotting away amid his decay. It stared back at him with the same vacant yet knowledgeable gaze gracing Sophia’s look. And Christian realized he needed the understanding those eyes possessed. He needed to see the world the way those sightless eyes saw it. He wanted to carve out the bird’s all-encompassing pupils and replace his own with them. He wanted to see through the eyes of death.

Because it had been so long since he’d spoken to anybody other than a drug dealer or a store clerk (he avoided his roommates and the squatters who took turns sleeping on the couch and floor downstairs) that no friend had had the opportunity to rest his hand on Christian’s shoulder and say, “Man, are you okay? You look like death warmed over…” No friend had come along who’d wondered, “What’s going on with you? You look like you need to talk…” No friend had sat across a table from him as smoke streamed from their shared cigarettes and blurted out, “Man, you really could use some help.” Nobody had said anything. And as a companion for misery, nobody made a wonderful friend. Christian wanted nobody forever. And he was prepared to make that wish a reality. All he needed was faith in that hole in the ceiling. It was time to climb through. The sparrow had done it. Why couldn’t he?

Kicking aside bottles and clothes, he wandered over to his six months unused bucket of masonry tools. Amid the dusty chisels and hammers and levels, he’d tucked in a stolen rope. It was neatly coiled and perfectly preserved. Christian reached in and pulled it out.

That rope had sat there through the months of his unending binge, waiting for the day when Christian’s alcohol, drugs, and money had all run out. Without even a cigarette to lift him through this early afternoon morning, Christian knew today was the day he’d use the rope for its stolen purpose. Truly, it had been a long time coming.

In his hands, the rope contained a certain amount of comfort. It felt good to finally make up his mind about something, to finally be on the verge of some sort of action. Too much time had been wasted. Too many days had blurred into one long, unending nightmare.

Was there a last moment he even remembered? Was there any way he could order the minutes and hours and weeks that had passed, one day lost the same as the next, one moment planted atop the other, flipping inside out and vomiting themselves – pure liquid with nothing solid in the spew – into a porcelain throne, around his feet on a tile floor, nothing but a wave of alcoholic haze fermenting in his gut into an ever stronger spiritual poison? The rope wrapped tight around all that lost time. It bound it into a neat bundle that his clicking, tear-choked throat could swallow – a sort of Christmas present for the end of the summer delivered by a Satanic Santa Claus. Like the rings of a tree revealing its age, every coil of the rope bound another worthless memory, another reality better forgot. But unfortunately, once something’s done, it can never be forgotten. Once something’s inscribed in Mnemosyne’s book, it can never be erased… at least, not in our waking hours.

But even in sleep, we’re tormented by dreams. Unless, of course, the substances turning our days into nights can turn our nights into endless blackness. But with no substance to make the day sleep, Christian confronted everything he’d ever done, everything that had ever happened to him. In a moment of clarity, he saw his life’s vast wasteland stretch out endlessly behind him, and he foresaw that wasteland stretching eternally before him. He closed his eyes and wiped his hand down his cheeks. It came away slick with sweat. At some point in time, all things must come to an end.

Shivering from chemical desires, Christian confronted his own impending apocalypse, his final judgment. Jesus, his forehead held between two fingers, sat to his left. Satan fumed on his right. Before the bench, each argued their cases. God banged His gavel, and the Fates took their places. With an automatic impulse, Christian wrapped and rewrapped the rope around his hand.

Was this really what his twenty-seven years on planet earth had been barreling towards? Had every event, the interminable calculus of existence, really compounded themselves into this one point? Had the derivative of all his experiences finally been determined? The answer was nil, an empty set. Is that even possible? Christian checked in with his beliefs. They were vacant, as desolate as the alley where he’d consumed his last bottle of Wild Irish Rose the night before. Nothing.

Still coiling the rope, Christian walked back to his chair. He grabbed the chair and slid it directly underneath the hole in his ceiling. He climbed atop the chair, and with the rope in one hand, he reached up into that hole in the ceiling. Stretching to his limit, he tossed the rope overtop one of the 2×8 supports stretching across the beams holding up the roof. Peering into darkness, he looped the rope around the support. A miserable sweat broke out on his forehead. He rubbed his trembling hand across it, and it came away dotted with bits of the dead bird’s downy feathers. He tried to remember how that could have happened, but he couldn’t. He eyed the rope’s distance from the ground. He toyed with the length until his few years of working construction assured him the distance was correct. He tied the rope off and tugged on it to make sure its fabric would support the weight he intended to dangle from it. Then, he looped the bottom end of the rope around itself again and again, a trick he’d learned while working construction. With his shaky fingers, it was difficult to feed the loose end in between the coils, but somehow, as if driven by divine guidance, he managed to do it. When his noose was completed, he slipped it over his head. It rested weightlessly upon his shoulders. He pulled the knot down to tighten the noose around his neck. Its bristles rubbed rough against his flesh. And before he had a chance to doublethink his thoughts, he kicked back hard with his heel and knocked the chair out from underneath himself.

With a thud, the chair fell to the ground, and with dramatic speed, Christian dropped down until his involuntarily extending toes reached a mere inch or two from the wooden floorboards. The rope snapped taut and held tight. It slammed Christian’s brain into his skull. It pulled against his throat, cutting into his esophagus and blocking the passage of breath as he swung miniature circles through the air. Instinctually, he gasped, but nothing filled his lungs. He gasped again, but all that occurred was a choked click emanating from the middle of his throat. His eyes bulged against their sockets. His throat felt like it was being sawed in half. He tried to swallow, but his Adam’s apple caught against the noose.

The enduring agony of the rope erased every thought as soon as it became visible. As he hung there, sadness reached out from his gut and strained tears behind his eyes. He spun, and his gaze passed heaven-like over the disorder of his cramped living space. His entire existence appeared in his room’s wreckage. He passed the point where he had dropped Sophia’s picture, and a vision of her flickered behind his eyelids. She smiled coquettishly and waved her hand for him to follow. Then, she disintegrated into darkness.

As the remnants of his breath escaped him, panic took hold. He stuck his finger between the rope and his neck, but he only succeeded in using his own digit to strangle himself. He summoned all his strength to hoist his body up the rope. He flexed and pulled and reached with one hand to try to get to the support and untie the rope from where it held fast, but holding the entirety of his weight with one arm, he quickly gave up. His hand burned as it slid down the rope, and he fell back into place. He kicked and kicked in a vain attempt to loosen himself, but his exertion only spun him in ever widening circles. With reality closing in faster, he fumbled with the knot behind his head. But in his suffocating panic, with a whooshing noise beginning to rush through his world, he couldn’t think straight, and he only managed to pull the noose even tighter. Contorting his mouth with a gasping grimace, he strained again to pull himself up to where the rope was tied, but no matter how hard his shoulders and arms flexed, nothing happened.

He began feeling light-headed. In an inverted rain reminiscent of an acid trip, stars shot upwards from the floor. The world faded dark at the edges, but in its disappearing, captured light, Christian’s sight settled on the sparrow dead on his floor.

So this was the realization the tiny bird had had before it had fluttered into his cluttered bedroom. Emptiness pressed outward from inside Christian’s lungs. His hollow stomach twisted around itself, and a tickling emotion crept from it down his intestines, into his legs, and through his feet until it ended up twitching between his toes. The last thing he remembered thinking, after the world had gone black, before convulsions began coursing through his body was, “Jesus, I don’t want to die.”